대화Korean Conversation Practice — 17,507 Real Dialogues with Translations
Two-turn exchanges from the 국립국어원 dictionary, grouped by what they are about and graded by the word each one illustrates. Not phrasebook lines: ordinary Korean, with the reply included.
- 대화Dialogues
- 17,507
- 주제Topic sets
- 565
- 낱말Words illustrated
- 10,879
- 번역Turns translated
- 99.9%
급수별By TOPIK level
A set is graded by the word it teaches. The sentence around it usually runs a little ahead, which is the point.
많이 나온 주제The deepest sets
Where the dictionary's examples cluster, which is roughly where daily Korean does.
읽는 법How to read a set
Every block is one word and every dialogue in the dictionary that uses it. Read the Korean first and the English second — the translations are there to check yourself against, not to read instead — and pay attention to the second turn. That is where Korean does the work English does with intonation: 그렇구나 against 그렇군요, -잖아 against -거든, the difference between agreeing and conceding.
The word heading links back to that word's row in the vocabulary, where the definition, more examples, its conjugation and its related words are. The dialogues are the last stop, not the first: they show a word already known being used, which is a different job from learning it.
자주 묻는 질문Common questions
Where do these Korean dialogues come from?
They are the example dialogues in the 국립국어원 한국어기초사전 — written by lexicographers to show a word in use, not generated. 17,507 of the 21,357 in the dictionary are published here, grouped by what they are about, and 99.9% of the turns carry an English translation from the same source. The other 3,850 belong to words whose subject is too small to have a page or has too few dialogues at their level to fill one; nothing is left out for being poor.
How is a Korean conversation different from a textbook sentence?
It has a second turn. A single sentence shows you what a word means; an exchange shows you what it answers and what gets said back, which is where the particles, the speech level and the sentence endings stop being grammar and start being choices. Every dialogue here is two turns for that reason.
Which level should I read?
A set is graded by the word it illustrates, not by the difficulty of the whole exchange, so the surrounding sentence often runs a level or two ahead. Read one level below where you are studying if you want to read fluently, and one at your own level if you want to work. TOPIK 1 has 60 sets, TOPIK 2 has 69 sets, TOPIK 3 has 96 sets, TOPIK 4 has 100 sets, TOPIK 5 has 85 sets, TOPIK 6 has 94 sets.
Why does each word's dialogue appear on only one page?
Because a word belongs to several categories and its dialogues would otherwise be published two or three times over. Each word contributes its exchanges to the most specific category it belongs to, so every dialogue on this site appears exactly once and no two pages here hold the same material.
Is there audio for the conversations?
Not for the dialogue lines. The 국립국어원 recordings are one per headword, so the audio button on each block plays the word being illustrated and there is nothing to play for the sentences themselves. Rather than synthesise a voice, this site plays what was actually recorded.
Dialogues, translations and word meanings from the 국립국어원 한국어기초사전, used under CC BY-SA 2.0 KR.